Dancing Feminisms

Dancing Feminisms

Elena del Río

Publisher:

Edinburgh University Press

DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748635252.003.0004

This chapter discusses the shifting relation of feminist film theory to the female body as a site of narcissistic and visual pleasure, tracing a kind of theoretical history of narcissism, from its most negative Freudian implications to its most affirmative and productive Deleuzian modality. It considers Sally Potter's Thriller and The Tango Lesson as symptomatic of the evolution undergone by the feminist relation to the female body in the last decades. The chapter suggests that Potter's explicit involvement with the medium of dance in both these films directly conveys the ways feminist theory has either repressed or allowed for the representation of the female dancer/performer as a source of sensual and narcissistic pleasure.

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